They Should Be Black

All my technology is failing me. My laptop won’t switch on, and won’t reset. The computer game I bought to fill some hours requires a code, but when I feed in the only code I can find in the documentation it tells me it’s not valid. My phone refuses to do more than vibrate, so I am missing most of my calls and messages. All the various chargers I have bought for my chromebook work only intermittently, and not for long. My new, and allegedly smart, TV doesn’t support Amazon Video, so I am unable to continue bleakly distracting myself with Law & Order: SVU . My superstitious paranoia convinces me that all these things are messages from the universe, external reality reflecting my internal state. And I feel completely unequipped to deal with them. Faced with these difficulties, I give up.

Yes. I give up. I have reached a dead end of the soul. It’s not just that I don’t have the energy to fight any more, it’s that I no longer have any faith that fighting will change things, or is any kind of answer. “You have to try”, my occupational therapist said. I nearly told her – and part of me dearly wishes I had – to fuck off out of my house. I am in a kind of rage, resisting the recovery doctrine she is such a proponent of, deeply resenting the parts of me that are so damn eager to be good, that have in the past chattered away at her about mind maps and coping strategies, knowing that this pleased her.

I am not good.

But she sees those parts as the real Jane, the well Jane. She doesn’t want to talk to me. I am just an illness, a low mood that must be battled with, altered by hot baths and bracing walks. I am just a thought process that must be changed.

When will someone understand?

I fear that no one will ever understand.

There is art therapy. I keep going, because I am all out of other ideas. But the forces that blank me out and shut me down are so powerful that I don’t know if anything can ever be different.

My psychologist broke my heart. It will be a long time before I dare to hope again.

I resist hope. Hope is dangerous.

There was a moment, during the art therapy session on Friday, a moment when my mouth spoke one of the voices in my head without any blockage or intervention. “They should be black”, it said. It was a moment of connection, between the inside and the outside of me. On the walk home that connection kept kind of sparking in me, and there was an urge trying to move me to unpack the art room and make the image that was forming in me.